Blue Window

Deborah Cooper's poetry delivers healing compassion, bringing readers into a landscape of solace and renewal.

Dark clouds this morning

casting shadows on the waves
and still the birds sing,

one of sorrow, two of grace.

Granted a residency at the Cill Rialaig Artists Retreat in County Kerry, Ireland, Deborah looked out from the loft of a stone cottage through a blue-framed window as she crafted a number of the poems collected in this volume.

Yet even as she sometimes describes the world through a lens of grief (Deborah began writing when she was a hospice chaplain), this collection includes many new works on the theme of light returning after a night of solitary wakefulness.

"Marked by breath and memory, by the holiness of ordinary things, each page opens windows to a world of empathetic light."

(Kimberly Blaeser, Wisconsin Poet Laureate 2015-16)

Blue Window is Cooper's sixth volume of poetry, following Under the Influence of Lilacs (Clover Valley Press, 2010). Her poems appeared in two collections by her writing group of twenty years, including Bound Together: Like the Grasses (Clover Valley Press, 2013), winner of the Northeastern Minnesota Book Award for Poetry. Deborah co-edited three anthologies of poetry, most recently Amethyst and Agate (Holy Cow Press, 2015). She was the 2012-14 Poet Laureate of Duluth, Minnesota.

Blue Window is a rich collection of poetry for anyone seeking consolation and expression of the arresting loveliness of "this right light."